


Featured

by ideal_girl (trainwreckdress)



Category: Transmetropolitan
Genre: Backstory, Canon - Comics, M/M, Multi, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2007, recipient:kangeiko
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-31
Updated: 2007-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-14 14:41:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/150358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trainwreckdress/pseuds/ideal_girl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If someone were to ask Spider who he counts as a friend? First, he'd laugh. Second, he'd gut you with his bare hands. Journalists don't have any friends; they have sources, targets. And first and foremost, Spider is a journalist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Featured

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by the greatest filthy assistants ever: Ave_eva gave me encouragement, commas, and some great ideas. Ethrosdemon held my hand. Any mistakes that remain are mine and mine alone.

The first time Yelena has sex, it's all right -- not earth-shattering like the feeds she's not supposed to watch tell her, and not painful like the feeds she's supposed to watch do. The guy's nice enough -- one of her dad's friend's sons or something. She never comes when he's inside her, but he spends hours licking at her cunt while politicians spin lies in the courtyard of her father's house, making her spasm and cry out into her pillows.

The guy's an idiot, anyway, and she hangs out with him for a few months because his dad is working with her dad and she's got some totally out-dated sense of whatever, propriety or something, and she's almost relieved when he tells her he's decided to move to Tibet and become a fucking monk.

She puts on a show for her dad, loses eight pounds -- not because she's sad, but because she's so excited.

"How long did you date, anyway?" Royce asks her, years later, smoking curling around his head like a halo. He tilts his head and smirks. "Bet you never let him fuck you in the ass."

"Cocksucker," she snarls, flicking the ash of her almost-spent cigarette at him. It lands somewhere on the breadth of one of his thick thighs, snuffed out by the expensive weave of his trousers.

She's about to tell him that it wasn't that she didn't "let" the guy -- it was more like the fucker never tried -- but then Spider's shouting something about "mutant werebabies are stealing the last of the hallucinogens!", and she forgets all about it.

*

Royce tries not to think about things he can't remember, which is why he thinks it's hysterical that Yelena keeps making noises about castration every time someone insinuates that she fucked Spider.

"So it didn't happen?" he asks, lazily sipping from a glass of what he thinks is probably whiskey, but -- knowing Spider -- is monkey piss laced with LSD.

"No, it didn't fucking happen! Nothing fucking happened!" Yelena's right up in his face now, her face bright red and her forehead straining. "Absolutely fucking nothing! I don't remember anything, so nothing happened, all right?! Fuck!"

Channon rolls her eyes as she cleans a lovely slice of violence in the shape of a gun she recently used to take the head off of a chipmunk at 300 feet. The weapon makes a satisfied click noise as she adjusts the sight.

Royce waits until Yelena backs off, lights two cigarettes. "Okay, so, if nothing happened, why are you so fucking worked up about it?" He offers her one of the cigarettes, but she turns purple, and stomps out of the room, breaking something heavy and expensive on her way out, shouting something about "even pretending to be related to you!"

"Fucking Spider is typically something you don't forget." He drags on both cigarettes, feels decadent and wasteful. He knows it's a good look on him. Channon snorts with laughter. "Or so I've heard."

"You need to get laid more often, Royce." Channon's eyes are shuttered behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses he saw tucked into her long blonde hair earlier. She cocks her head toward the door, toward _out there._ "You up for some hunting?"

Royce stands up, shakes out the wrinkles in his suit. "As long as it's for pussy, my dear."

*

Channon wonders if little girls dream about becoming hookers when they grow up. She thinks they might, the way half the girls she sees on the streets dress. So much skin on display; it's lost all power of suggestion. She covers up now, mostly, if only because it feels wrong -- scandalous, even.

"Channon?" Royce calls to her from a street vendor, waves her over while he lights another cigarette. The vendor's sign boasts chewing gum that gives you the sexual prowess of a T-rex. Royce buys a pack. "You really celibate now?" he asks, waving the gum in her direction.

She sighs, her fingers brushing over the gun at the small of her back, checking and rechecking out of vigilance and as a subtle reminder to Royce that she could kill him at any time. "Now I see how you and Spider have remained friends for so long."

They start walking again, this time in a direction that takes them away from the poor, mean streets, and toward the more affluent areas where people don't even bother walking -- opting for the crisscross of tunnels that connect the buildings

"We're not friends, Channon," Royce says, quiet enough Channon has to strain to here him over the hum of traffic. His dentist-perfect teeth gleam white in the dying sunlight -- a smile that costs more than Channon even cares to count. "I'm his editor."

*

If someone were to ask Spider who he counts as a friend? First, he'd laugh. Second, he'd gut you with his bare hands. Journalists don't have any friends; they have sources, targets. And first and foremost, Spider is a journalist.

"You're no fucking journalist, S," he remembers Royce said that to him once, sprawled out in a train compartment somewhere between Stuttgart and Berlin. It must have been a while ago, because Spider thinks he had hair and Royce didn't have that rich insulation of fat around his midsection. "You're a fucking storyteller, an embellisher, a con artist. Fucking fluff pieces about German aristocrats people couldn't give a shit about. You're no journalist, Spider, you're a fucking _features writer_." It's the last bit that hurts the most -- Spider's two months out of school and doesn't want to write _features_. The very word is disgusting to him. "If you want to get real---" Royce cuts off to suck in a lungful of purple-tinted smoke, coughs it back up wetly. "You want to get real, right?" Spider, young, stupid, naïve (He'll never admit it in mixed company, but he was, all right, he fucking was, he didn't pop out of the womb this fucking amazing, he was birthed by hard work.), just nods, listens to this crazy motherfucker as he tells him, _"this is what you have to do."_

It's not until years later that Spider realizes that Royce became an editor because he can't write for shit -- he can talk a good game, but put him in front of a keyboard and he becomes even more of an asshole than he is. But he can move it, and shake it, and get Spider what he needs to bring down the most corrupt slimeballs known to man. He takes care of making sure they have a place to sleep at night, and money to booze and whore it up as they wind their way across Europe. The BBC reporters start following _them_ , two kids on assignment for some crappy paper in the States, and they build a following and their reputations. It's the good old days -- before Spider became a bastard and Royce became a corporate whore.

It's easy, back then, when they're hopped up on green pills and sandwiched in between bodies of unknown genders, to let their hands slide together when passing the bottle of whiskey back and forth. _"We're just talking, darling, no need to get worked up -- here, have another drink."_ Royce knows how to get them relaxed; Spider knows how to get them to talk. The whores spill it, stories all about the telecommunications executives they service regularly. Spider pats his breast pocket, satisfied they have it all on tape. Their source is golden, literally, painted from head to toe with a matte shine. They're in some backroom of a club that shares a wall with the Temple, a detail Spider didn't miss on their walk over.

Royce sits back as the source starts sucking his cock, tells Spider to stop sweating the small stuff. Royce's fingers spasm against the bottle resting against his thigh. Spider watches the rise and fall of it for a second, but is distracted by hands on his belt, cool fingers easing inside his trousers. He fumbles in his jacket pocket, cracks a pill between his teeth as hot, wet heat envelopes his dick.

"Fuck, fuck, Royce, here," he tries to offer Royce a pill, one that protects/cures/does whatever when it comes to STDs that he's sure they'll pick up tonight.

Royce shakes his head, smiles a little maniacally. His teeth are crooked, but shine in the dim light. "Living dangerously, S."

*

All Royce remembers about that night is that at some point he had a dick in his mouth and Spider's hands in his hair. That he's sure it was Spider's hands, but _not_ sure it was Spider's dick, is probably a product of the drugs. Or his over-developed sense of heterosexuality.

Their story hit the wires the next day. It ruined some lives of some high-level rich fucks, but made them famous -- Royce got his first office with a door and Spider got his first column.

When he watches Spider growl and pant and tear the rotten guts out of the city they both love while he stays behind closed doors and runs damage control, he wonders if it ruined their lives, too.

*

Spider remembers everything.

 _Everything._

That's why he's a journalist.

It's also why he's a bastard.


End file.
